Officer Jones
by not for granted
Summary: AU... Instead of a costume, Jessica Jones decides to put on a badge. But being in the NYPD might be harder than being a superhero, especially when they stick her with a partner she can't stand just after the Incident. And it gets worse when she starts to figure they might be the only honest cops in their precinct.
1. Chapter 1: Prologue

**I had the plot going in my head for a while, and thought I'd contribute to it after watching, and rewatching, both seasons of "Jessica Jones" on Netflix.**

 **Can't promise the most regular updates, but I always plan on finishing my stories, whichever I start.**

 **Disclaimer: I do not own Marvel's "Jessica Jones" and affiliated comics or television series.**

* * *

Today had been a pretty shitty clusterfuck of a day, with a healthy sprinkling of goddamn disappointment on that crap sundae.

First, Jessica was out of a job, _again_. It seemed a salvageable enough situation, once she showed her hand and blackmailed the sleaze running that white collar sweatshop for some well-deserved severance, but then he made an uncalled for crack about her parents. That opened up old wounds. Day drinking with her best friend should've cheered her up, except now some yuppie asshole (Robbie or Bobby or something) introduced himself by offering to play Trish in 'the Love Tester', singing the old theme song and (loudly) talking about how "It's Patsy" was his best spank-material as a preteen.

No she was not in the mood to play nice.

"I'll play you," she said. He didn't seem to mind the idea, but clearly she was his second choice behind Trish Walker. Her fragile self-esteem... how would it ever recover?

Trish seemed to pick up what she was getting at and wanted to put a stop to it before there was a scene, ever the mediator. "Jess," she warned tiredly, "it's not worth it."

"I think it is." Yeah, maybe Trish Walker was used to sleaze bags harassing her since she was fifteen but that didn't make it right. Besides, Jessica knew that she had some issues to work out. First day looking to start a new career, might as well hustle an asshole. "But I'm not really feeling the love tester..." She made a show of looking over the games this bar had to offer, like she hadn't already planned how to deflate this douchebag as soon as he mentioned his 'bald-headed bishop'. "How about the strength tester?"

Douchebag Bob or whatever seemed to think that was funny. And no longer leering at Trish, so step in the right direction already.

"If I win," Jessica baited the hook, " you pay our tab, apologize to my friend, and find somewhere else to drink."

Sleazy smile, with a whole lot of undeserved overconfidence. "And _when_ I win?"

Trish had to stifle a snort at that, looked over her drink, clearly thinking 'alright, finish him'.

Jessica thought 'my pleasure' right back, plastering on an overly-flirty smile. "You win, I'll take you out back and meet that bald-headed bishop."

He matched her pasted-on smile with a smug, shit-eating grin. "You're on."

Her fake-as-shit smile fell off as soon as the douche turned his back, all his frat-boy yuppies egging him on.

Go figure, the frat boy could throw a punch. Probably had to fight off all the accusations of date rape. Machine took its pounding in stride at least.

Still affecting the part of a silly twig of a bitch, Jessica pouted as she stepped up for her turn. "Mm, it looks so hard..."

"Not yet it's not," said the Wall Street douche, his friends sniggering on cue. She could practically feel his eyes on the inside of her jeans.

When she made a fist, it was hard enough to pop the knuckles. Alright, maybe she was going a little overboard on the strength tester but wasn't like this shit didn't deserve the humility.

WHAM!

The punching bag of the strength tester game was sturdy enough to stand up to a whole bunch of strangers doing their best to clock it to stroke their egos, an endless stream of New Yorkers punching their feelings out. It was not built tough enough to stand up to her though, and now the punching bag looked like a broken-in baseball mitt.

And the douchebag's face looked like someone punched his man-card hard enough to give him hot-flashes.

Good. Nyah-nah-nah-nyah-nah.

With a mortified expression and his face turning the color of cottage cheese, the douche conceded defeat and flipped through a roll of bills. More than enough to pay their tab. "'rry," he muttered.

Now Jessica admitted she could leave it alone but where was the fun in that? "I didn't hear you asshole."

He turned back around, looking furious but too embarrassed to do anything about it. The douchebag had made too big a scene already, all eyes in the cafe were on him. Plus he was looking reasonably certain she'd be able to kick his ass if he tried anything.

He'd be right.

Now, much louder, "I'm sorry!" Then he left with his boys, looking deflated. His boys trailed after him, some looking stunned and others looking like they'd never stop giving him shit for this. She'd have to remember to feel sorry for him later. Much later.

Trish of course had that look on her face; the one that said she didn't approve but was still very happy with the end result. Or maybe she did approve but wasn't happy with herself for approving? Meh. Honestly if Jessica stopped to be worried about how much Trish approved of how she used her abilities, she'd never get anything cool done.

Their server (or waitress or whatever was the term) had a different look on her face. A 'holy shit did that just happen?' sorta look. For a second, Jessica was worried that she'd be asked to pay for the stupid strength-tester machine, which would be complete bullshit. Whole city put out their frustration on that thing after a few drinks, it was going to break eventually, Trish was already on low-rent 'damage-control', spinning a fib about Jillian Michaels (as if), and hopefully that would be the end of it.

No such luck, the waitress broke out of her deer-in-the-headlights impression long enough to ask, "Do you box or something?"

Fair enough question. "Nope. Just eat my spinach and junk."

"She eats a lot of junk," confirmed Trish, covering her smirk with a sip of her own drink.

"Shut up."

"Your form is terrible," the waitress blurted. "No offense, my cousin throws in the ring for his precinct, he's pretty good."

"I'll keep that in mind," Jessica lied. Her 'form' was hard enough to break the machine as is, she didn't really want to go toe-to-toe with a freight-train or the Hulk anytime soon.

"Precinct?" Trish looked interested, which made Jessica a different sort of nervous. In fact, it made her more nervous than having to pay for that stupid game.

"Yeah he's a cop," the waitress explained, looking to Jessica again. Jessica recognized that look too; curious, doubtful, but willing to be convinced with some evidence. "Are you 5-O?"

Jessica snorted. "Five-nine, but not in these heels." The joke clearly went over chatty-Kathy-wonder-waitress' head though. "No I'm not a cop. What, do I look like a cop?"

Surprisingly, the waitress seemed to consider it, but then just shrugged and left for another table.

"I was going to ask for a refill," Jessica groused. Someone just cost themselves a tip. And she had just won all this money from a douchebag too.

Now Trish definitely had a look on her face. A 'great power means a greater calling' or something like that look on her face. The kind that made sure Jessica never would get a moment's peace. "That's not a bad fit..."

"What is?" Jessica swigged her drink, which was an alright mix of sour and sweet, just barely passable as a day-drinking beverage.

"You," Trish said, excitedly. Oh great, now she was gesturing. "You could be a cop. You should be a cop-"

Yeah and Jessica nearly spat out the drink. Thankfully being around Trish as long as she was, and liking booze as much as she did, she had trained herself to be immune to spit-takes, no matter how ridiculous the suggestions could be. "No way."

"Why not?" Trish demanded, crossing her arms and raising an eyebrow. "Why do you think you shouldn't be a cop?"

"Are you serious right now?" Jessica set down her drink with great, exaggerated reluctance. "I have no experience with law-enforcement, I've never carried a gun, I have a record, I look like shit in blue, I hate cops, I have a well documented history of problems with authority in general, and I don't want to."

"Wow you've given this some thought," said Trish, eyebrow still raised.

"Mm-hmm." Jessica went back to her drink, declaring this check-and-mate in her head-

"Except," Trish started counting on her fingers, "you need money, you don't have a job, you would make good police, you're a born detective, you'd be the authority, you can't run away from all jobs that have authority unless you want to go for self-employed with your big nothing planned, and at the very least you'd kill it at the physical."

Shit. "Well I don't want to."

"You have a better job lined up?" Probed Trish. Of course she wasn't going to let this go. Dammit.

"I'm not a cop," Jessica insisted. "You know I'm not cop material. They wouldn't want me as a police."

"This city needs good police," Trish countered, getting into her 'crusader' tone of voice. There was no arguing with her after that. "You could make a difference."

Jessica broke out her best eye-roll for the occasion. "Oh not this again."

"This again," Trish confirmed grimly. "You're strong, you're smart, who cares what you did when you were a teenager? And they'll probably be taking more applicants for the NYPD after everything that's happened. The throw-down in Harlem, the Incident..?"

"Who would be stupid enough to want to be in the middle of that?" Jessica scoffed.

"Heroes," said Trish, flatly. "The cops you hate?"

"I didn't say I hate cops," Jessica denied reflexively.

"Yes you did," insisted Trish. "Less than half a minute ago."

"Well I didn't mean it," Jessica waved her off, sadly noting her drink was empty now. When did that happen? "I say things I don't mean all the time, like 'I love you' or 'I'm never drinking again', it's just words."

"You've never said 'I love you'," said Trish, having the temerity to sound hurt. Where did she get off?

"Not to you anyway," Jessica teased, hoping to deflect and deflect this conversation away.

No such luck. "You always say you don't know what to do with your life, that you're sick of jobs that don't make a difference. And I'm always telling you you'd be making a difference if you used your... gifts to help people. And you tell me you don't want a costume, you could make all that difference in uniform."

"I don't want to wear uniforms," Jessica complained. She knew she was whining now. "And I never said I wanted to make a difference, I was tired of 'pointless' jobs. There's a difference."

"You'd be making a difference," Trish repeated, like a broken record, "if you used your powers in a position where you could help people. Normal cops do it whenever something freaky happens like aliens or hovercrafts or Avengers level shit spills all over, and those are normal men and women-"

"Or however they identify," said Jessica, still hoping she could nip this whole thing in the bud. And again, no luck, the idea stuck in Trish's head like a weed.

"-all those normal men and women," Trish continued, undeterred, "without the things you can do face things that make ordinary people run, make them have to run. You don't have to run though. You could be a hero."

"You want to see how to be a hero? Drinks on Trish Walker everybody!" Jessica called out, waving that roll of bills in the air happily. The cheers drowned out Trish's righteous tirade for a little bit, but Jessica knew that wouldn't last.

Truthfully it was more a relief than anything else when Trish came to her later in the week with an application instead of a latex costume she probably got at a sex-shop.

And then the rest was history... and a changed future.


	2. Chapter 2: Problem Officers

**Had a bit of a writing bug, comes from having this story in my head since season one of "Jessica Jones".**

 **Really hope to have gotten the characters' voices down, Jessica is fun to write for when she's sarcastic, but shit will get cynical and depressing.**

 **Which reminds me, if anyone believes this story should bump to an 'M' Rating for the language, let me know. And a special shout-out will be given to the first reviewer who can point out a Spider-Gwen character getting name-dropped.**

 **Disclaimer: I do not own Marvel's "Jessica Jones" and affiliated comics or television series.**

* * *

More and more often lately, Jessica found herself retreating to daydreams, scrounging as desperately as a starved tomcat through the garbage for pleasant, happy thoughts to get her through the day. If she ever ran out of distracting happy thoughts, she might end up doing something she'd regret.

Couldn't let that happen now, not with a gun on her hip.

Yes, much to her surprise (but frustratingly not to Trish) she was accepted into the NYPD. Training was a bitch, a lot of studying, she didn't think she'd ever get some of that bike safety protocol out of her head. But with some all-nighters studying and cutting back on the drinks, the written tests weren't that much different from high school or community college. Turns out she proved what she already knew, and was pretty damn smarter than the average bitch. Suck it, Dorothy Walker, and swallow all those predictions that her adopted daughter would be a drain on society.

And the physical tests? Ha, please. Honestly it was harder for her to do average enough not to get people suspicious of any of her abilities. But it was worth breaking the facade just to win a bet with a blowhard; over two-hundred and fifty pounds benchpress in the gym got everyone talking, and handily outstripped the gym-rat champ of their precinct by almost thirty pounds.

Thinking back to the look on his face when she shattered his record was one happy thought. So was the look on Trish's face the first time she got a look at her in the dress blues. Honestly Jessica had a hard time keeping the smile off her face then too, even if she hated to admit it.

Jessica was running out of happy thoughts now though.

Kittens, puppies, kittens and puppies playing together. A long hot shower like she didn't have to worry about the water bill. Fit guys in tank tops. The _crack_ of a cold can of beer getting top popped.

"Hey," snapped the current bane of her existence, the curse for all her past misdeeds, her GI Joe punishment; Simpson. "Would you focus?"

"I'm not the one driving." Another in a long list of problems actually, he never let her drive. She wasn't sure if the precise reason but overall she figured it had to do with sexism and maybe a bit of homophobia. Not that Jessica was a lesbian but plenty of people had been making assumptions about her sexuality before she put on the uniform. Now that she was a cop she had been called every variation of 'dyke' and 'lesbo' and 'rug-muncher' a multi-ethnic cultural hub like New York City could provide.

Wouldn't put it past Simpson to be a homophobe. Everything about him screamed "right-wing nutjob". He served overseas, was very proud of his time spent with the Special Forces, but clammed up whenever she (or anyone else) asked about what his actual role in the war effort really was. She pegged him as a wannabe action hero who probably went off-the-rails and open-fired on a school bus of brown children, or burned down a whole village.

Last she heard, she was his third partner since he made sergeant. Apparently they both were deemed 'problem officers'.

That made sense in Simpson's case, he rubbed her the wrong way (not literally though, she'd have broken his arm) almost immediately. He was sanctimonious, controlling, and aggressively gung-ho about everything. For God's sake, just the other day he had spent an entire patrol ranting about how he would have handled the situation with the two mean green giants tearing apart Harlem, like uniformed cops could've done anything worth a damn where the Hulk was concerned. And when he talked about responding during the Incident, all wistful-like, Jessica got the disturbing impression that war-zones got him hard.

She really didn't think she deserved to be saddled with him as a partner though, and clearly he didn't either. First week on the job he had the balls to treat her like she was his mentee or something, like she needed a fucking babysitter or something. When she proved she wasn't a damsel in distress or any of that bullshit, and totally showed him up catching the self-professed 'Bodega Bandit' in a surprisingly intense footchase, then he stuck to just ignoring her until she made a mistake for him to correct.

Between passive-aggressive put-downs and obnoxious mansplaining, they kept talking on patrol to a minimum. Simpson could pout like a sixteen year old girl jilted on prom night, and the sad thing was _that_ was when he was the most bearable.

Also, he never let her drive. Hardly top of the list of things she hated about him, but it added to her ongoing theory of him being a chauvinistic piece of crap.

She really, really didn't think that she deserved this. Chalk that up to the NYPD being run by a bunch of a-holes.

"Don't know if I can trust you to have my back if you keep up the daydreaming," said Simpson. "Your head is in this, isn't it?"

"Get your head out of your ass and you'll see exactly where my head is," she muttered.

He spared her a suspicious glance. "What?"

"Nothing," she lied. "Too early for this shit."

"Maybe you had a late night," he reasoned, with all the concern of a coiled cobra. "You miss breakfast? We could stop for something quick."

Jessica, to what she thought was her credit, considered his phony concern seriously for a brief moment. "I'm fine."

"You sure?" A beat. Jessica was ready for a crack about her watching her figure or more sexist bullshit. What Simpson did end up saying instead was, "carbs might help you sober up."

She gave the Captain America knock-off a basilisk glare, with extra ice.

He offered no apology, but neither did he press the issue.

Of all the rumors Jessica had to deal with now that she was a cop, ranging from her honesty to her sexuality, her sobriety was challenged the most, far more regularly than she'd like. If she was feeling generous, fat chance, maybe she'd admit it didn't help her case how she could drink the old-school, wife-beating, suck-on-a-potato veteran coppers under the table. Wasn't her fault her metabolism and her tolerance was built up that six beers felt like a single tall-boy, and a six-shooter of whiskey felt like two fingers, heavy on ice. And it wasn't her fault every day she felt the aches and pains of a regular human body pushed to making high-jumps like she was playing hopscotch or working the heavy-bag at the gym like she was kneading a loaf of dough.

Sonofabitch Simpson, of course he'd think the worse. She suspected he also was the guy who started the rumor that she had been using steroids to keep up with the boys. Jessica only had been a cop for three months and twice she had been 'randomly' picked for drug tests.

Worse, she just had to take it, resigned to a foreseeable future of peeing in cup after cup instead of risking someone thinking she was a 'gifted' cop. Every variable in every scenario she went through sucked tailpipe, from being labeled a menace, a cheat, or a freak and having her shield taken away, or being stuck on the 'freak-beat' until some alien invader or evil-as-shit perp with Avengers-level superpowers blew her up.

They probably wouldn't even give her a posthumous medal if that went down.

"I'm not hungry," she repeated, as calm and coldly as she could manage.

"Suit yourself," he replied back, nonchalant to the point of being dismissive.

Jessica retreated back to happy thoughts; to a girl she saved when she was dressed like a hoagie, waiting for her paperwork to come through at the academy, a humiliating, shitty part-time job that managed to put her in the right place at the right time when a little girl nearly got hit by a car. Pulling that girl aside, bracing herself against that car, saving a life... she knocked Trish's talk about making her into a career superhero but no lie, it felt good to help someone.

The radio crackled to life. " _Got a 10-52 in progress._ "

Simpson answered, because of course he did; he didn't let her answer their squad radio either.

'Suit yourself' she thought bitterly, 'see if you expect me to learn the jargon if you don't let me talk, you douchebag.'

And now Jessica got a sour taste in her mouth thinking about how she helped more people dressed as a sandwich than she did three months in police uniform.

"-copy."

Oh great, what did she miss?

"Barfight at this hole in the wall in Hell's Kitchen," Simpson repeated, with a grimace. He was one of the cops who would keep trying call the neighborhood 'Clinton' even after the Incident put it back to '80's grit and grime. Clearly bothered him to give up.

That gave Jessica some small measure of happiness. "Are we doing this or do you need time to put on your riot gear?"

"Yeah figured you like this one," said Simpson, eyes on the road. Then, casually, "it's a bar at 2PM on a weekday after all."

And now Jessica's new happy place officially included putting Simpson in a headlock and taking an electric razor to his godawful, Hitler Youth haircut.

"Would you stop smiling like that?" He said, annoyed. "It's creepy."

This week couldn't go by fast enough.


End file.
